Time Phantom – Randy Anderson

The first of a series (the next is set in Copenhagen), Time Phantom opens in New York in the year 2070, with a 50-year-old lady called Tonja preparing for a special ritualised execution – her own. She suddenly turns and runs. Through her escape, we get an idea of how the time travel process works, and its impact on the traveller.
    
Time Phantom - Time has a new speed.
 
We next meet Dane Vanderbrouk in 2019, a 50-year-old male model who is going through a personal crisis (a divorce, where his cheating wife got everything), and has travelled to Amsterdam to forget. It’s his birthday. He is NOT there to visit the museums!

It is in a local pub that he first begins to Time-Travel. His method is unique, in that if he sits still too long, he goes back in time, and forward when he moves too fast. You really empathise as he comes to terms with his new power, the déjà vu, and feel his disorientation. As one character states, it’s Mr Toad’s Wild Ride on acid weird.
We also meet the assassin from the future, who is chasing Dane, for reasons to be explained, and Natali, and a host of others. The world is now run by one single corporation, and the world of the future is bad. And it’s up to Dane to save it, when-ever he can!

The mechanics of time travel are well-explained, to my mind at just the right level to keep the story clipping along, balancing between the heavy sci-fi fans need to have things connect, to the more general reader who just doesn’t want the jargon to get in the way of a good read.

It is fast-paced, with more of your time being spent on the edge of your seat than anywhere else. A rollicking good read, a fresh take on a well-used premise, and set up perfectly for both the sequel, and the inevitable film!

What if time travel were related to your movements, or lack thereof? Life would certainly get a bit more interesting, and troublesome, like it does for Dane in Time Phantom: Amsterdam by Randy Anderson. 

Having just finalized his divorce, male model Dane Vanderbrouk travels to Amsterdam to while away his troubles with various vices. But while smoking and drinking on his fiftieth birthday, things take an interesting, albeit it uncomfortable, turn for Dane when he begins to inexplicably travel back in time. Having relived the same few days over and over again, he slowly begins to understand that staying still for too long sends him back in time, but when he moves quickly he travels forward in time. Just as he gets the knack of how to manage this quirky talent of his, his life is threatened by an assassin from the future, forcing Dane to travel back to New York, only to wind up much further into the future than he ever anticipated as he struggles to get back to his life as he previously knew it. 

Capitalizing on a rather unique time travel mechanism, the story moves forward and backward in time, muddying the waters of both history and the future through Dane's actions. The writing was solid, entertaining, and well-crafted, aside from the scientific info-dump that helped to explain Dane's ability for time travel that pulled me out of the intensity of the moment. There were interjecting vignettes from a time and about a character that weren't fully integrated into this particular narrative, which left additional unresolved elements to the story that merely raised questions - perhaps it's a set up for subsequent installments in this series, but it detracted from the momentum of the story at hand. 

Overall, I'd give it a 3.5 out of 5 stars.